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Italy’s declining fortunes in World War II
- Mussolini held his country in thrall from 1922 to 1943, until Italy’s declining fortunes in World War II led to him finally being overthrown and arrested. To conceal his location from German forces who wished to reinstate him, the captured Mussolini was moved around over the course of 1943.
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How did Benito Mussolini respond to Il Duce?
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When was Mussolini arrested?
On 27 July, military police led by general Francesco Saverio Pólito took Mussolini to Gaeta, boarded the ship Persefone and imprisoned Mussolini in an isolated house on the island of Ponza in the Tyrrhenian Sea from 12:00 on 28 July to 7 August. [8]
In July 1943, Allied troops landed in Sicily. Mussolini was overthrown and imprisoned by his former colleagues in the Fascist government. In September, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies.
Only two months after Mussolini had been dismissed and arrested, he was rescued from his prison at the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the Gran Sasso raid on 12 September 1943 by a special Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) unit and Waffen-SS commandos led by Major Otto-Harald Mors; Otto Skorzeny was also present. [166]
- Overview
- Early life
While working for various labour organizations in Switzerland, Benito Mussolini made a name for himself as a charismatic personality and a consummate rhetorician. After returning to Italy, he amassed a large following while working as an editor for the socialist magazine Avanti!. His political beliefs took a hairpin turn to the right midway through World War I, when he stopped decrying the war effort and began advocating for it. After World War I he began organizing fasci di combattimento—nationalist paramilitary forces known for wearing black shirts. These groups began waging campaigns of terrorism and intimidation against Italy’s leftist institutions at his behest. In 1922 Mussolini and other fascist leaders organized a march on Rome with the intention of forcing the king to yield the government to Mussolini. It worked, and Mussolini was appointed prime minister that same year. By 1925 Mussolini had dismantled Italy’s democratic institutions and assumed his role as dictator, adopting the title Il Duce (“The Leader”).
Read more below: Rise to power
Blackshirt
Learn more about the fascist squads.
What were Benito Mussolini’s political beliefs?
Benito Mussolini was Europe’s first 20th-century fascist dictator. But Mussolini’s political orientation didn’t always lean that way. His father was an ardent socialist who worked part-time as a journalist for leftist publications. In his initial overtures into politics, Mussolini’s beliefs took after his father’s: he spent time organizing with trade unions and writing for socialist publications in both Switzerland and Italy. Mussolini’s politics took a turn to the right midway through World War I, when he became a proponent for the war effort. It was during this period, and after, that the nationalist and anti-Bolshevik strands of thought that would characterize his later politics began to emerge. These politics included the themes of racial superiority, xenophobia, and imperialism that defined his actions as a dictator.
Mussolini was the first child of the local blacksmith. In later years he expressed pride in his humble origins and often spoke of himself as a “man of the people.” The Mussolini family was, in fact, less humble than he claimed—his father, a part-time socialist journalist as well as a blacksmith, was the son of a lieutenant in the National Guard, and his mother was a schoolteacher—but the Mussolinis were certainly poor. They lived in two crowded rooms on the second floor of a small, decrepit palazzo; and, because Mussolini’s father spent much of his time discussing politics in taverns and most of his money on his mistress, the meals that his three children ate were often meagre.
A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully at school and moody at home. Because the teachers at the village school could not control him, he was sent to board with the strict Salesian order at Faenza, where he proved himself more troublesome than ever, stabbing a fellow pupil with a penknife and attacking one of the Salesians who had attempted to beat him. He was expelled and sent to the Giosuè Carducci School at Forlimpopoli, from which he was also expelled after assaulting yet another pupil with his penknife.
He was also intelligent, and he passed his final examinations without difficulty. He obtained a teaching diploma and for a time worked as a schoolmaster but soon realized that he was totally unsuited for such work. At the age of 19, a short, pale young man with a powerful jaw and enormous, dark, piercing eyes, he left Italy for Switzerland with a nickel medallion of Karl Marx in his otherwise empty pockets. For the next few months, according to his own account, he lived from day to day, jumping from job to job.
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At the same time, however, he was gaining a reputation as a young man of strange magnetism and remarkable rhetorical talents. He read widely and voraciously, if not deeply, plunging into the philosophers and theorists Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges Sorel, picking out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no coherent political philosophy of his own yet impressing his companions as a potential revolutionary of uncommon personality and striking presence. While earning a reputation as a political journalist and public speaker, he produced propaganda for a trade union, proposing a strike and advocating violence as a means of enforcing demands. Repeatedly, he called for a day of vengeance. More than once he was arrested and imprisoned. When he returned to Italy in 1904, even the Roman newspapers had started to mention his name.
Nov 16, 2009 · On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, is voted out of power by his own Grand Council and arrested upon leaving a meeting with King Vittorio Emanuele, who tells Il Duce...
- Missy Sullivan
Sep 11, 2023 · On 12 September 1943, a German commando raid liberated deposed dictator Benito Mussolini from the hotel in the Italian mountains where he was being held. The SS claimed the credit for the momentous operation, however it was actually a German major with Swiss roots who led the mission.
On the 27th of April 1945, Mussolini, his mistress and their entourage were captured by Italian partisans near the village of Dongo on the shores of Lake Como. The next morning, the once-mighty Il Duce was shot dead by firing squad.
